Yule took a breath and extended his hand in the manner Adelaide had once shown him. The stranger took it, with a smile that revealed a higher-than-necessary number of teeth.
“And what’s your name, dear boy?”
“… Julian. Julian Scaller.”
“Cornelius Locke. Thrilled to have you on board, Mr. Scaller.”
As a young man in the Written, Julian searched for doors with the boundless confidence of a young person in love who assumes the world will contort itself to accommodate his desires. There were times—after fruitless weeks of trawling through the archives of some distant City, eyes aching from twisting themselves around half a dozen languages, or after miles of hiking across jungly hillsides without the slightest sign of a door—when he felt doubt creep in. Treacherous thoughts slunk through his skull as he lay in the unguarded place between sleeping and waking, thoughts like What if I grow old searching for her, and never find her?
But by morning such thoughts had burned away like mist at dawn and left nothing behind them at all. He simply rose, and kept searching.
Now, trapped in Adelaide’s world, I search with the desperation of an old man who understands that time is a precious and finite thing, beating away like a second hand in my chest.
Some of that time I’ve spent simply learning how to navigate this world—a place I find baffling, sometimes cruel, and profoundly unwelcoming. There are rules about wealth and status, borders and passports, guns and public restrooms and the shade of my skin, all of which change according to my precise location and timing. In one place it might be perfectly permissible to visit the university library and borrow a few books; yet the same action in another place might inspire a call to the local police, who dislike my attitude, arrest me, and refuse to release me until Mr. Locke wires an apology and an upsetting amount of money to the Orleans County station. Under certain conditions I might meet with other scholars in my field and hold forth on the archaeological value of mythmaking; at other times I am treated like a rather clever dog that has learned to speak English. I have been feted by Persian princes for my discoveries; I have been spat on in the street for failing to cast my eyes aside. I am invited to dine at Cornelius’s table, but never to join his Archaeological Society.
In fairness, I have also seen the beautiful and admirable in this world: a group of girls flying kites in Gujarat, moving in a pink and turquoise blur; a blue heron fixing me with its golden stare on the banks of the Mississippi; two young soldiers kissing in a dim alley in Sebastopol. It is not a wholly evil world, but it will never be mine.
I’ve wasted more time fulfilling my end of Cornelius’s bargain. And what a devil’s bargain it’s turned out to be: my papers at the border identify my occupation as an exploratory archaeological researcher, but they might more accurately say well-dressed grave robber. I once overheard the Uyghurs of China refer to me by a long and complicated name filled with fricatives and unpronounceable combinations of consonants—it means the story-eater.
This is what I am, what I have become: a scavenger scouring the earth, burrowing into its most secret and beautiful places and harvesting its treasures and myths. Eating its stories. I have chiseled out sections of sacred art from temple walls; I’ve stolen urns and masks and scepters and magic lamps; I’ve unearthed tombs and stolen jewels from the arms of the dead—in this world and a hundred others. All for the sake of a rich man’s collection on the other side of the world.
What a shameful thing, that a Scholar of the City of Nin should become a story-eater. What would your mother say?
I would do worse things to find my way back to her.
But I’m running out of time. Your face is my hourglass: each time I return to Locke House it’s as if I’ve been gone for decades rather than weeks. Entire lifetimes have bloomed and faded for you, months of secret trials and triumphs that have subtly molded your features into someone I hardly recognize. You’ve grown tall and silent, with the mistrustful stillness of a doe just before she bolts.
Sometimes—when I’m either too tired or too drunk to steer my thoughts away from dangerous places—I wonder what your mother would think if she could see you. Your features so plainly and painfully her own, but your spirit tightly laced beneath good manners and the invisible burden of unbelonging. She had dreamed for you a different life, one profoundly and perilously free, unbounded, every door standing open before you.
Instead, I’ve given you Locke House and Cornelius and that awful German woman who looks at me as if I am unwashed laundry. I’ve left you alone, orphaned, ignorant of the wondrous and terrible things seething just beneath the surface of reality. Cornelius says it’s for the best; he says it isn’t healthy for young girls to grow up with their heads full of doors and other worlds, that the time isn’t right. And after all he’s done—rescuing us, employing me, raising you as he might his own daughter—who am I to object?
And yet: If I ever find your mother again, will she forgive me?
This is something I do not let myself think. I will begin again on a fresh sheet of paper so I do not see the words glaring up at me from the page.
Men like myself cannot see anything beyond our own pain; our eyes are inward-facing, mesmerized by the sight of our own broken hearts.
This is why I didn’t notice for so long: the doors are closing. Or, perhaps more accurately, the doors are being closed.
I should have seen it sooner, but I was even more obsessed in the earliest years, convinced that the very next door would open onto the cerulean seas of my homeland. I followed myths and stories and rumors, I looked for upheavals and revolutions, and at their twisted roots I often found doorways. None of them led me back to her, and so I abandoned them all as quickly as I could, taking time only to scavenge and plunder. Then I packed their stolen treasures in sawdust, scrawled 1611 CHAMPLAIN DRIVE, SHELBURNE, VERMONT on the crate, and departed for the next steamer, the next story, the next door.
I did not linger long enough to see what came next: unexplained forest fires, unscheduled demolitions of historic buildings, floods, property development, cave-ins, gas leaks, and explosions. Sourceless, blameless disasters that turned the doors to rubble and ash and broke the secret links between the worlds.
When I finally recognized the pattern—sitting on a hotel balcony reading an article in the Vancouver Sun about a mine-shaft collapse where I’d found a door only the week before—I did not at first blame human agency. I blamed time. I blamed the twentieth century, which seemed hell-bent on Ouroboran self-destruction. I thought doors might not belong in the modern world, that all doors were destined to close eventually.
I should have known: destiny is a pretty story we tell ourselves. Lurking beneath it there are only people, and the terrible choices we make.
Perhaps I knew the truth, even before I had proof. I felt myself growing suspicious, worrying that strangers were watching me in Bangalore restaurants, hearing footsteps behind me in the alleys of Rio. Around that time I began writing my missives back to Cornelius in a code of my own invention, convinced that some unknown entity was intercepting my reports. It made no difference; the doors kept closing.
I reasoned with myself: What did it matter that these particular doors were destroyed? They were all the wrong doors. None of them would take me back to Ade, to our stone house above the City of Nin, to that moment when I climbed the hillside and saw the two of you curled on the quilt: golden, whole, perfect.